1. Field of the Invention
The invention is in the general field of games and gaming technology, in particular children's games and gaming technology.
2. Description of the Related Art
A historic way for social interaction has been games, usually using set or established rules, which also rely on skill, chance, and competition. Such games are a way for people to have fun, build relationships, strengthen cognitive skills, promote organization and planning, and educate in an unobtrusive way.
Successful games are not easy to develop, however. In order to be successful, the game process or “rules” must be rather precisely tuned as to not to be too easy, and not to be too hard, and to engage the players sufficiently that they continue to find the game to be pleasurable over a sustained period of time. As a result, game design is an unpredictable art, where rules must be tuned, often by a process of trial and error, in order to achieve the necessary balance needed for a game to obtain widespread use.
Once a successful set of game processes or rules has been devised that proves to be popular upon prolonged play use, this set of processes or rules can then be implemented in various formats, including a game kit comprised of various physical game pieces, or alternatively a electronic or computer game in which the various game pieces can, for example, be represented as computer graphics displayed on a computer video screen, and the manipulations can also be done electronically, often on a computer CPU such as a microprocessor, and the rules are implemented in the form of software that is executed by the CPU/microprocessor and in turn manipulates state of the computer system's memory.